Tuesday, January 18, 2005

Netflix has finally decided that I'm worthy enough to receive Shaun of the Dead after having it at the top of my queue for like a month.

I understand that Netflix feels it needs to throttle users who burn through movies by not getting them new releases as quickly. It enables them to ensure that new customers can get any movie they want and have a good experience. That's completely cool with me.

But a month? Jesus.

Anyway, it's not enough to make me want to jump ship. Netflix has done some cool stuff with RSS (so you can see my queue over there on the right) and other cool collaborative features like letting me see what my friends like and dislike so I can use that to help judge movies I haven't seen. And the turnaround has generally been pretty good, though it's been much slower over the past couple of weeks than in the month before Christmas (maybe a subscriber spike after Christmas?).

On the whole, though, Netflix has been an amazingly good deal for me (at least in my opinion). I've had the service for a full year now. In that time, I've rented 109 movies at a total cost of $257.98, for a cost per movie of $2.37. Not too shabby. If I use about $4.10 as the cost of a Blockbuster rental, I've "saved" myself roughly $190.